When I’m working with ASP.NET MVC, I find myself wanting to do things “the Rails way.” There are a lot of excellent conceptions/conventions in Rails where I think ASP.NET MVC could really learn something.
One thing I really dislike about ASP.NET MVC is the way it handles routing. I find the default route in ASP.NET MVC ({controller}/{action}/{id}) to be very ugly, antiquated, and super greedy. When I’m writing an application I like the URLs to be “hackable.” This isn’t possible with the default ASP.NET MVC routes. Take, for example, something like a book website. Using the default route, you would have something like /books/edit/1. Now what happens if we remove that one (the id)? Boom 404! What about the default route for a single book? You would have /books/details/1. You know what happens if we remove that id. The URLs just do not flow nicely.
Routing Approaches
Why do I prefer Rails routing? Their approach makes so much sense to me, not to mention that you get nice restful routes. The approach that Rails takes is called resource-based routing.
ASIDE: What is a resource you ask? You can think of a resource as a model, and with a model, you would typically want CRUD operations. That’s where the “routing” comes into play. Instead of using a greedy route, it sets up specific routes to handle the CRUD operations for a given resource. We’ll be taking a closer look at this as we continue, but if you’re eager to learn more, head over to the Rails Guides on Resource Routing.
With this resource approach, the URLs follow RESTful conventions and embrace HTTP. Isn’t that one of the key concepts behind the MVC pattern, embracing HTTP?
Let me show you an example of the difference in approaches.
We’ll base the comparison on the basic seven actions that are required to perform CRUD operations (assuming you have a New and Edit action to handle an HTML form, otherwise you would only need five).
The ASP.NET MVC Approach
| Action | HTTP Method | URL |
|---|---|---|
| Index | GET | /books |
| Create | GET | /books/create |
| Create | POST | /books/create |
| Details | GET | /books/details/1 |
| Edit | GET | /books/edit/1 |
| Edit | POST | /books/edit/1 |
| Delete | POST | /books/delete/1 |
Notice how only HTTP GET and POST are being used? HTTP has more verbs than just those two. Why not use some of these to clean up our URLs and be RESTful? Continue reading
